Last week, research into the connection between fracking and radon, an odorless, colorless, radioactive gas, drew international attention, making headlines in English, German and Italian. The study, published in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that buildings in Pennsylvania counties where fracking is most common had significantly higher radon readings than the levels found in counties with little shale gas drilling — a difference that emerged around 2004, when the shale rush arrived. The potential link between fracking and radon in people’s homes was surprising, the researchers, based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said. “We found things that actually didn’t give us the reassurance that we thought it would when we started it,” Brian S. Schwartz, MD, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins told the Baltimore Sun. In a little-noticed move just one day after the Johns Hopkins report was released, a Pennsylvania court allowed the state’s environmental regulators to keep the public from reviewing data from radioactivity testing at oil and gas drilling sites. Tags: frackingradonRadioactivepennsylvaniadataDelaware Riverkeeper NetworkJohns HopkinsPennsylvania Department of Environmental Protectionpublic healthlung cancerriskcorrelation not causationheadlinesEnvironmental Health Perspectivesshale gasnatural gashydraulic fracuringshale rushradioactivitynaturally occurring radioactive materialsopen recordsright to know law